Your author, while in the army, was stationed in Southern Germany as part of the US military occupation after the Second World War. I recollect how upon being impressed by how nice and kind and friendly people were toward one another, and toward myself, how it had immediately come to mind how painful it must have been for the many ordinary good hearted Germans, who were not Nazis, as organized society was celebrating all around them the bloody conquests of all the neighboring countries by their German soldiers.
They would have witnessed the radio and newspapers hail the German occupation of most of Europe while praising fallen German soldiers for their service to the fatherland; a fatherland representing the most wondrously superior and virtuous people on the face of planet Earth.
Does this author's recollected question about the feeling of non-Nazi Germans during Nazi-Germany's many genocidal invasions and bombings of so many innocent populations strike a bell of comparison with the reader's own possible problem with living in an American society that goes on engaging in so many enjoyments while its TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, school books and sports announcers praise as heroes, Americans in uniform killed in one of the dozens of nations invaded and bombed by the Armed Forces of their proud and free United States of American, the absolute best and most moral country in the world ever; and thanking those serving the cause of freedom and protecting that exceptionally democratic and fair minded USA.
Did the good people in Germany feel compassion for the women, children and elderly being killed and maimed in neighboring Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Holland, and other countries suffering Nazi invasion and deadly occupations?
Conversely, from your author's experience, most Americans did not seem to show compassion for the children, women and elderly in Iraq, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Panama, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Cuba nor the suffering of the innocent people in a couple of dozen of other small nations which have had their governments violently overthrown by the United States with resultant loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and suffering of millions as in Guatemala, Congo, El Salvador and South Sudan?
Archival research as a activist peoples historian has turned up some plausible categories of the behavior of normally good hearted citizens residing in Germany during the Second World War:
1. Citizens who protested and wound up dead or incarcerated.
2. Citizens who were intimidated into maintaining a facade of patriotism (read pro-Nazi government or at least never openly critical of that government's domestic deadly terrorist persecution of Jews and communists and most certainly not critical of its' foreign policy of wars).
3. Citizens who were swept away with the euphoria produced by the multitude willing to believe the lies of Nazi propagandists who disguised the regime's genocidal policies against Europe's Jews, claiming that the Jewish population was being "resettled,"[1] and among other achievements inculcated the idea that for example, 'Russian and Polish lives and lives taken during Nazi invasions of other countries were lives that didn't matter.
The author invites his readers to make their own assessment of why in the United States of America today, wherein Black lives seem to matter less, Iraqi lives matter not at all, and why for example, from 1945 through 1975 Vietnamese lives also did not matter at all for the majority of America's citizens. (All the more puzzling and painfully embarrassing since the US invasions of both Vietnam and Iraq have since been declared mistakes by the highest US military authorities involved without a bit of remorse expressed for the many millions of innocent precious lives brutally taken during those mistaken invasions.)
Endnotes
1. Quoted from US Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia
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Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Dissident (more...)
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